When you buy a stock, you should have a good reason for doing so and an expectation of what the price will do if the reason is valid. At the same time, you should establish the point at which you will liquidate your holdings, especially if your reason is proven invalid or if the stock doesn’t react as expected when your expectation has been met. In other words, have an exit strategy before you buy the security and execute that strategy unemotionally.
If the strategy is within your risk limit, then testing begins. Manually go through historical charts to find your entries, noting whether your stop loss or target would have been hit. Paper trade in this way for at least 50 to 100 trades, noting whether the strategy was profitable and if it meets your expectations. If it does, proceed to trading the strategy in a demo account in real time. If it's profitable over the course of two months or more in a simulated environment, proceed with day trading the strategy with real capital. If the strategy isn't profitable, start over.

Before making your first investment, take the time to learn the basics about the stock market and the individual securities composing the market. There is an old adage: It is not a stock market, but a market of stocks. Unless you are purchasing an exchange traded fund (ETF), your focus will be upon individual securities, rather than the market as a whole. There are few times when every stock moves in the same direction; even when the averages fall by 100 points or more, the securities of some companies will go higher in price.

As written in section Investing 3, you should never keep any valuable assets on an exchange, unless you engage in day trading. You should get an appropriate wallet to store your cryptocurrency safely. To explain the concept better, what you are storing is not the cryptocurrency itself, but your private keys, the keys that allow you to spend the cryptocurrency that is assigned to you and stored on the blockchain of the given cryptocurrency (of course each project has its own blockchain, just like each bank has its own internal banking system – to simplify heavily). Anyone who has access to your private key is in control of your cryptocurrency assets, so you must secure them. Most if not all of the wallets around have a feature called a backup phrase. It is a mnemonic sequence of words that must be written on paper and stored securely. If you lose access to your wallet, get it lost or stolen or whatever, this backup phrase should allow you to recover instantly access to your private keys and funds, after which you should immediately transfer them to a new address.

It’s all fun and games until the taxman passes. There is no clear legislation on taxes and it varies on per case and per country basis. My personal recommendation is to declare the money you cash out on your tax form. This would normally be taxed as « financial income money », just like if you sold shares or cashed out money from the income of your own company (like when you get paid dividends). Example: 15% financial income tax. You cash out 10000 EUR, you get taxed 15% on this.

Bonus Stock Market Tip: Everything above is related to how best to invest actively - in other words buying and selling into companies that have been selected by you. But what if you don't have the time, money or inclination? What if the paragraphs above put you off? Perhaps you were looking for a simpler guide? The stock market for dummies perhaps?
Plug Power is an excellent example of the volatility investors may experience when they buy stocks beneath $5 – in the early months of 2020, shares of Plug Power rocketed up over 80%, only to suffer 50% losses shortly thereafter. While speculators may have enjoyed the pop and drop, true investors would be wise to buy and hold Plug, which makes hydrogen fuel cells for commercial vehicles. Plug’s fuel cell shipments have increased dramatically over the last two years, and the company recently announced a partnership that will usher the world’s first fuel cell-powered, zero-emission commercial trucks onto the road. This opens Plug to new business opportunities as companies around the world turn toward clean energy solutions.
Buy “the basket”: Can’t decide which of the companies in a particular industry will be the long-term winner? Buy ’em all! Buying a basket of stocks takes the pressure off picking “the one.” Having a stake in all the players that pass muster in your analysis means you won’t miss out if one takes off, and you can use gains from that winner to offset any losses. This strategy will also help you identify which company is “the one” so you can double down on your position if desired.